Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This review of the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, illustrates everything that is wrong with academia. The Chronicle of Higher Education seems offended that people outside the orthodoxy of what he styles as the "field of consciousness studies" would gather and discuss the topic in a serious way. I get that he thinks a lot of the content is nonsense. A lot of the content in most conferences is nonsense. But if it's approached earnestly and carefully, it sometimes turns out that this nonsense is valuable. And that's why people have conferences like this, and hatchet jobs by Chronicle reporters do far more harm to scholarship that people thinking hard about the idea of consciousness out there in the desert.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 09:34 a.m.

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